Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936) was an influential English writer of the early twentieth century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy, and detective fiction.

Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox."[1] He wrote in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. For example: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."[2]

Contents

He is one of the few Christian thinkers who are admired and quoted equally by liberal and conservative Christians, and indeed by many non-Christians. Chesterton's own theological and political views were far too nuanced to fit comfortably under the "liberal" or "conservative" banner. And in his own words he cast aspersions on the labels saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."[3] He was the cousin of A. K. Chesterton.

Life

Chesterton at the time of his engagement, 1898

Born in Campden Hill, Kensington, London, Chesterton was educated at St. Paul's School. He attended the Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator and also took literature classes at University College but did not complete a degree at either. In 1896 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. In 1902 he was given a weekly opinion column in the Daily News, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he would continue to write for the next thirty years.

According to Chesterton, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.[4]

However, as he grew older, he became an increasingly orthodox Christian, culminating in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around three hundred pounds. His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he wasn't “out at the front.” He replied, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.”[5] On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, “To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England.” Shaw retorted, “To look at you, anyone would think you caused it.”

He usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and had a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Chesterton often forgot where he was supposed to be going and would miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she would reply, "Home."[6]

Chesterton died on June 14, 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The homily at Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox. Chesterton is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at 28,389 pounds sterling.

Writing

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some two hundred short stories, four thousand essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularized through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.

Much of his poetry is little known. The best written is probably “Lepanto,” with “The Rolling English Road” the most familiar, and “The Secret People” perhaps the most quoted ("we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet"). Another excellent poem is “A Ballade of Suicide.”

Of his non-fiction, Charles Dickens (1903) has received some of the broadest-based praise. According to Ian Ker (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, 2003), "In Chesterton's eyes Dickens belongs to Merry, not Puritan, England" (see Merry England); Ker treats in chapter 4 of that book Chesterton's thought as largely growing out of his true appreciation of Dickens, a somewhat shop-soiled property in the view of other literary opinions of the time.

Much of Chesterton's work remains in print, including collections of the Father Brown detective stories. Ignatius Press is publishing a Complete Works.

Views and contemporaries

Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humor. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics. When The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's contribution took the form of a letter:

Typically, Chesterton combined wit with a serious point (here, human sinfulness) and self-deprecation. The roots of his approach are found in two earlier strands in English literature; Dickens is one. The other is the use of paradox against the complacent acceptance of the status quo. In this respect, he is often categorized with Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whom he knew well. Both were Victorian satirists and social commentators in a tradition that includes Samuel Butler (1835-1902).

Chesterton's style and thinking were all his own, however, and his conclusions were often diametrically opposed to those of his predecessors and contemporaries. In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Oscar Wilde:

“

The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.[8]

”

Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw were famous friends and enjoyed their arguments and discussions. Although rarely in agreement, they both maintained good-will towards and respect for each other. However, in his writing, Chesterton expressed himself very plainly on where they differed and why. In Heretics he writes of Shaw:

“

After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.[9]

”

And:

“

In similar style, I hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and wrong. . . It may be true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to me, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is wrong. But it is equally true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to himself, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is right. Mr. Shaw may have none with him but himself; but it is not for himself he cares. It is for the vast and universal church, of which he is the only member.[10]

”

Shaw represented the new school of thought, humanism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton regarded humanism as a disaster. In Orthodoxy he writes:

“

The worship of will is the negation of will. . . If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.[11]

”

This style of argumentation is what Chesterton refers to as using “Uncommon Sense”—that is, that the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, though very clever, were saying things that appeared, to him, to be nonsensical. This is illustrated again in Orthodoxy:

“

Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."[12]

”

Or, again from Orthodoxy:

“

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.[13]

”

Incisive comments and observations occurred almost impulsively in Chesterton's writing. In the middle of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states:

The Chesterbelloc and accusations of anti-Semitism

Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism.

Hugh Kenner asserts that “He and Belloc had powerful minds, which their contrived personalities hid from the periodical public and also inhibited from real use.”[15]G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother who died in World War I.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper in 2005, Patrick Wright leveled the accusation of anti-Semitism at Chesterton.[16] In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.[17] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by JewishZionists who saw him as an ally in their goal to achieve just that. In 1934, after the Nazi party took power in Germany he wrote:

“

In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people.[18]

Influence

G. K. Chesterton, 1910

Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (December 14, 1950) [19] Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know," and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (December 31, 1947),[20] "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton The Everlasting Man." The book was also cited in a list of ten books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life."[21]

Chesterton's biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens' work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars. T. S. Eliot and Peter Ackroyd, among others, were impressed by his scholarship.

Chesterton's Orthodoxy is considered a religious classic by many. Philip Yancey said that if he were "stranded on a desert island … and could choose only one book apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy."[22]

His physical appearance and apparently some of his mannerisms were a direct inspiration for the character of Dr. Gideon Fell, a well-known fictional detective created in the early 1930s by the Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr.

Ingmar Bergman considered Chesterton's little known play Magic to be one of his favorites and even staged a production in Swedish. Later he reworked Magic into his movie The Magician in 1958. Also known as Ansiktet the movie and the play are both roughly similar although the two should not be compared. Both are essentially the work of two authors with widely different world views.

Some conservatives today have been influenced by his support for distributism. A. K. Chesterton, the right-wing journalist and the first chairman of the National Front, was a cousin.

The Third Way (UK) campaigns for the widespread ownership of property, distributism, which he espoused.

Credits

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